BLEACHERS BREW EST. MAY 2006

Someone asked me how my blog and newspaper column came to be titled "Bleachers Brew". It's like this, it's an amalgam of sorts of two things: The bleachers area in the stadium/arena where I used to sit when I would watch baseball, football, and basketball games and Miles Davis' great jazz album Bitches Brew. That's how it got culled together. I originally planned on calling it "The View from the Big Chair" that is a nod to Tears For Fear's second album, Songs from the Big Chair. So there.

Wednesday, January 11, 2017

FIFA will vote for a 50% increase
in participants in the World Cup after the games in Russia in 2018. The
participating nations increase from 32 to a whopping 48! The group stages will
feature 16 groups of three countries with the top two advancing into the next
stage.

I am all for the growth of
football but this decision is all about votes and money.

Just when you think that it’s all
hunky dory with the removal of Sepp Blatter and all those implicated in the
bribery and corruption scandals, the man now at the helm of world football who
incidentally was implicated in the Panama Papers controversy, is proposing
change. He ran for the presidency promising to increase the number of
participating countries to at least 40.

He sure learned from Joao
Havelange and Blatter about dangling World Cup slots in exchange for votes.
Naturally, he won.

And to think the wheel isn’t
broken.

The motto for the world-governing
body for football is “For the game. For the world”.

I think they should add a third component
– “For the money”.

The 2014 World Cup generated $4.8
billion in television rights and sponsorships. Four point eight freaking
billion. Another $550 million was pocketed from ticket sales. After all costs
(production and others), providing developing nations a “kitty” and handing
over $100 million to the CBF, FIFA kept a cool $338 million.

Now imagine what monies will be
earned from 48 nations in the World Cup!

There are pros and cons to this
proposed new format.

Pros.

You bring the excitement to other
countries who have never participated as they are given exposure.

The game will keep even more
people enthralled during the World Cup (as if they aren’t already).

I am not going to talk about the
money aspect here.

Cons

The current format of 32
countries is fine. If you want to add, four more is fine. But 16! The World Cup
should be difficult to get in not easy. If you want more participation then add
slots for Asia, Africa, and the Americas and not Europe.

Why do you want weaker countries
in this tournament? You dilute the competition. That is why there are the continental championships. That is where
they qualify.

The group stage means one less
match. How will this affect people who travel to the games? Two matches and
you’re out?

If you ask me, FIFA wants to get
more money from the huge markets like the United States, China, India, and the
monied Arabian countries. The new home
and away qualifiers for the World Cup has already added more games and increased
revenue. This new one will spike earnings.

That new format by the way is
already controversial as it eats into the club competition calendar.

But FIFA is a bully. It is the
clubs that pay for the care of the players and not the associations. Instead of
a happy common ground as the old format is, FIFA wants more.

Sure football too is a business.
You need money to run it.

Thirty-two countries is fine.
Thirty-six isn’t so bad. Any more than that is a joke.

But FIFA… if there is anything we
have learned is they have been laughing all the way to the bank for decades.